Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
Open Pictures, and Boomerang Ideals
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (November 20, 1909) : 27
U Michigan copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
Pictures should be openings in the wall, so many escapes from the room in which they hang. If they come out of their frames to you, refusing you shelter, failing you in your dumb nosing for a recess, they are not pictures, but furniture, and consequently abominations. Always open doors, magic countries, or presences into which one can flee, their very unreality makes it the easier to enter. Pictures should be openings in the wall, so many escapes from the room in which they hang...
Their lack of resemblance to all one knows makes the distance one has come refreshingly great, when one is inside. Their lack of resemblance to all one knows makes the distance one has come refreshingly great, when one is inside. Botticelli’s botany is so quaintly impossible, the earth carpeted with tufts of hitherto unseen but intimately known flowers, with leaves embroidered on the ground, ferns arranged with all their best sides forward, roses with the habits of peacocks. It is the nicest kind of country to wander in, for space has been carefully left for one to walk on. Trampling on anything is delightfully made impossible.
Then the inaccessible castles that some of the Germans give us, banked with cypresses and yews, outlined against skies with rolling clouds of a windy whiteness! One can breath in this land of Boecklin’s, and one might reach the castle. There is perhaps a road in the dip of the hill that leads to a small green door, unseen, but to be found. It is possible that walls would have to be scaled, hard climbing found necessary, but it could be contrived, and then how near the clouds one would be, how close to the wind. Perugino’s Umbrian hills, always tucked in behind his placid martyrs, take one’s eyes so far our eyes are frequently in such desperate need of a stretch — quite away to where all is softly blue and mountains lap the sky like waves the shore. It must have been so easy in Umbria to believe that the horizon was where the world ended, for so beautiful a finish could clearly not be bettered.
And then the great, wise, human people one can go and sit by, or sometimes — which is healthy and more novel — stand before. The vitality of Rembrandt Portrait of a Gentleman, so harmonious, big, and vibrant that one comes out of the frame laughing from sheer reassurance in mankind!
Mr. Hewlett : note 1Mr. Hewlett in his Open Country, a book whose charm and advertised sting are robbed of point by the Danteësque ideas of the hero, reminds us afresh of an argument that from time to time crops up and dazzles us with its boomerang qualities. Boomerang because the elevation of a certain very exalted idea seems to knock the man who built it twice as far down as others, when he thought he had gone a double number of leagues upward. Boomerang because the elevation of a certain very exalted idea seems to knock the man who built it twice as far down as others, when he thought he had gone a double number of leagues upward.
Senhouse — and, looking back over talkative mankind, it is surprising how large the group of Senhouses have been — refuses to marry the lady he loves because he loves her too exquisitely. He sees her so rare and spiritual a thing that he refuses to assist her in living an ordered human life high above the average. Fighting it out with much grace, poetry, and the shimmer of heat reasoning, he explains his stand at great length to her, himself, and the reader. Marriage being the bodily, material thing it is, a mere matter of property, a buying of riches you instantly lessen in value, he will have none of it. His ideal of a controlled, chivalrous state of marriage being so strong within him, he will remain a bachelor with no laws imposed upon him, and allow her to become the mistress of a bounder, she being a free, untainted goddess too good to be asked to share a trial of his fine, sun-bathed theories. Living in a caravan being to him the sane life, he takes no steps to prevent his lady installing herself at the head of a falsely complicated great house. And at the end of the book we see the gentleman cutting a rather poorer figure than the dull folk who, not seeing as he did how much better things could be, had managed to make them a little better than they were by a blind-folded stumble toward decency.
The men who have been given a seeing eye are evidently so trained by their observations that they are rendered incapable of action, and, having made out what an appalling amount there is to be done, they remain decidedly less active than most. True, to visualize is a great deal, to see the flight of a soul to words (the type is invariably gifted with a winged, darting tongue) should almost suffice. It would be unreasonable to expect that a signpost, having pointed the way, should follow the road it had itself indicated. It would be unreasonable to expect that a signpost, having pointed the way, should follow the road it had itself indicated. Yet it is very hard to remain unfired when we are asked to sorrow with these thinkers for the happiness they have denied themselves, and to have them pointed out as martyrs to an ideal renders one an, oh! of indignant protest. They are men who see a span to be jumped, sit lamely on the bank, their lags dangling comfortably in the mire, and rail at the people who for lack of eyes fall in and are engulfed.
Apart from the dandified idea that it is crass to apply a rule, the rolling of it on the moral tongue being more in sympathy with an Epicurean attitude, apart from the resemblance that Senhouses bear to men who cannot walk on high places for fear of falling off, so shuffle safely on the ground, there lies quite unconsidered the woman’s side of the case. It is greatly to be wondered what Sanchia thought of Senhouse later on when she began to sum things up. She in all probability took to making bitter remarks on the impractical dreams of youth, and for her to dub his untried ideals impractical was a pretty commentary on the substantiality of a Senhouse. He had left her a target for shock, chills, disillusionment, final callousness, and she revenged herself by going over to the large body of those who do not see.
Ah, the poor ideals which the world would so much like to attain if it only knew a little better now! They are made to seem sadly impossible by the enthrallingly garrulous Senhouses, for to our plodding, practical, unimaginative minds there is something very disquieting in the sight of a cook who pointedly refuses his own pasties.
Maeterlinck : note 2 Maeterlinck is a licensed small boy asking questions without cessation, resembling ludicrously (lovers of him begged to forgive the simile) the young rascal in the railway compartment who, between munches of a large currant bun, asked endlessly why the wheels went around, why the engine went, what the rails were for, why the engine was not on behind, if the steam really pulled the train; all of which his father answered until he asked if the coal knew it was making the steam, and then his parent exploded with, “Oh, eat your damn bun!”precursor to Samuel Beckett? : note 3 all of which his father answered until he asked if the coal knew it was making the steam, and then his parent exploded with, “Oh, eat your damn bun!” With all sorrow, a head bowed with the weight of its own iniquity, it is asked whether —
“Sélysette, why do you cry?”
“Am I crying?”
“Yes; the tears fall on my mantle. Are you unhappy, Sélysette?”
“No, I do not think I am unhappy. I feel — I do not know what I feel.”
“You have made me cry. Why are my cheeks quite wet?”
“I do not know. There is a wind in the trees; it frightens me.”
“You are afraid of the wind, Sélysette?”
“It makes the trees weep. Why do the trees weep?”
“Show them to me. Where are the trees?”
“I do not know, I do not know. They have gone. Why have they gone?” cannot best be adequately answered by a mutual request on the part of all the characters, backed by the reader, to eat their bun.
notes
Open Country was reviewed (and usefully contextualized, vis-à-vis Florida Pier’s take on it) in The New York Times (September 25, 1909) — Halfway House was reviewed by William Morton Payne in The Dial (October 1, 1908) Maurice Hewlett (1861-1923), novelist (historical and otherwise), poet, essayist Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), Beligian playwright, poet ex Lyn Gardner, her review of a London production of Maeterlinck’s drama The Blind, 20260813
A Romantic Tale of Outdoor Life;
Maurice Hewlett’s New Novel “Open Country” Deals With a Lovable Vagabond and His Wanderings.
link (paywall, but “shared”)
archive.org : link
wikipedia : link
wikipedia : link
in The Guardian (12 February 2008) : link